My first attempt at making utility poles out of wood:

...........the spell checker?  It was always on helping us spelling challenged folks.  I can't even find a button to turn it on.  Speaking of buttons, anyone know what this is ---? It opens the column with numbers, what are they?? 12.16.43???

Peter

What I'd like to see...

 While I understand you might be seperated by a few hundred miles or more,  I'd really like to see ya'll get together some how, and write a book on all of the aspects of the subject. The history* of it, the mines, operations,  the RR's involved, why you model the portion that you do. There's so much information hiding out there.

*Other than what's on Wikipedia. I'm sure there's more to it than that.

As you probably know, the transfer of energy in a conductor is a manifestation of the movement of electrons under the influence of an external charge. Electrons are not free to move in the conductor, but are loosely held in molecular orbits. (Each electron has its own orbit/energy in accordance with the Pauli exclusion principle.) When an electron absorbs a photon from the external electromagnetic field, the additional energy may cause the electron to leave the orbit or even the molecule, becoming a free electron movng on the vector imparted by the photon.